On December 16th Trump announced the US would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel adding more insult and injury to the Palestinian people and their struggle for national liberation.
Two days later, a then 16 year old Palestinian, Ahed Tamimi was detained, arrested and charged with 12 counts for resisting the Israel military occupation of her town Nabi Salih.
Israel incarcerates hundreds of Palestinian children like Ahed for simply resisting colonial extermination. Rather than incarcerating resisters, Israel should be charged with crimes against the Palestinian people and humanity.
Join the ANSWER Coalition as we “Put Israel on Trial” and expose: How Israel routinely commits violations of human rights through chronicling its history & why a two state solution cannot be a viable answer to the question of Palestinian Liberation. We charge Israel! Drop the charges on Ahed! Release her and all political prisoners of the settler reigme! Uphold the right to return! Free Palestine!
Location: MIT Bldg 5 Room 134
Food and Drinks will be provided
“The International Solidarity Movement has brought thousands of volunteers to Palestine to participate in Palestinian-led nonviolent resistance. Find out what we do, why we do it, and how you can be a part of it. We will show a short version of the film Radiance of Resistance, filmed in 2015 and 2016 by three ISM volunteers, mainly in the village of Nabi Saleh, featuring Ahed Tamimi (then 14 years old), who is currently in Israeli custody and threatened with years of imprisonment for slapping a soldier.
Activists, Rana Nazal and Islam Maraqa are among the Palestinian leaders of ISM in Palestine. Rana was arrested with Nariman Tamimi, the mother of Ahed in 2013.
Photo by Alex Levac: Bassam and Nariman Tamimi with daughter Ahed in Nabi Saleh
Rana Nazzal
is a Palestinian-Canadian activist, artist, and facilitator. She is immersed in community organizing in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and on Algonquin Anishnaabeg land in Canada. Like many Palestinians, for her activism she has endured beatings, injury from military weapons, arrest, and indictment in Israel’s military court system. Since 2014, Rana has run an activist leadership program based in Ottawa that works to empower young adults with the tools and frameworks necessary to fight for effective social change. She also developed an arts-based peer support program for refugee youth in Canada that continues today. She recently returned to Palestine and is based in Bethlehem.
Islam Maraqa
is a Palestinian activist and industrial engineer from Hebron. He has been a human rights activist since the second Intifada, in 2003, when Israeli military forces closed his university. He joined ISM in 2006, first as an activist and then as a coordinator and trainer of international volunteers. ISM work in Hebron included accompanying children to school along routes near settlers, direct confrontation with military forces, resistance against house demolitions and remaining with threatened families. Islam is a recognized and active member of his community, and especially in the resistance against human rights violations. Islam started the Marmara Housing Project with a group of Palestinians and internationals, to rebuild eco-friendly and practical homes for the Palestinian families whose homes have been bulldozed by Israeli Forces.
Music by CommUnity Voices
Join us for refreshments after the program.
All Programs are held on the second floor in the Lothrop Auditorium.
Small elevator, wheelchair accessible.
CCB is located near the Orange line-Back Bay or the Green line-Copley T Stops. On Street Parking and at Back Bay Parking Garage, 199 Clarendon Street. Discount Vouchers available for parking in the garage.
Community Church of Boston is located at
565 Boylston Street, 2nd fl., Boston, MA 02116
For more information: www.communitychurchofboston.org
Noon – 1 PM: Rally outside US mission to the UN: 799 UN Plaza.
1 PM – 2 PM: March to Times Square
2 PM – 4 PM: Rally at Times Square
Our demands:
– Release Mumia’s case files
– Free Mumia Abu-Jamal now
– Free all political prisoners
– End mass incarceration and police violence
– Liberation and reparations for all oppressed and occupied communities
Imprisoned Palestinian student leader Omar Kiswani is on hunger strike in Israeli prison in protest against his ongoing detention without charge and interrogation. Kiswani is the president of the Student Council at Bir Zeit University and was seized on 7 March when undercover Israeli occupation forces invaded the university campus, pretending to be journalists. They carried firearms in backpacks, entering the university campus during school hours and then attacked Kiswani in front of the Student Council Building in the center of the university campus.
Meanwhile, an occupation army unit detained all of the university’s guards in the guard room; the kidnapping unit used their weapons to threaten the student body as they dragged Kiswani from campus in the violent attack.
The attack on the university has been condemned by an array of institutions; it comes as one of a number of repeated invasions of Palestinian university campuses, especially in order to attack student councils and elected student blocs and organizations. Active students are repeatedly targeted for arrest and imprisonment and it has been estimated that at Bir Zeit University alone, over 60 Palestinian students are held in Israeli prisons. There are approximately 340 Palestinian university students jailed by the Israeli occupation.
“This act is a violation of the civilian nature of universities and educational institutions, especially that this is not the first time an Israeli army unit has raided Birzeit University’s campus, as it had done on numerous occasions and confiscated media paraphernalia belonging to student political parties, equipment, and computers,” said Sarah Pritchett of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate denounced the impersonation of journalists in order to carry out a violent attack on a student political leader.
Dozens of student union officers at UK universities signed on to a statement denouncing the raid, labeling it “the most recent example of Israel’s long-term and systematic assault on the Palestinian right to education.” “We, Friends of Birzeit University and student union officers in the UK, believe that we have a duty to take a stand against injustice and oppression. We stand in solidarity with Palestinian students denied their right to education and support their demands to live and study in an environment free from the violent practices of Israel’s occupation,” the statement continued.
Since being seized from campus on 7 March, Kiswani has been held at the notorious Moskobiya detention center in Jerusalem under interrogation. The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society stated that Kiswani is being interrogated 18 hours daily and has been prevented from seeing his lawyer since his arrest; his detention was extended by another week on Thursday, 22 March.
Students at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK held a protest on 20 March in which they demanded the release of Kiswani and other student prisoners, expressing their solidarity with Palestinian students under occupation. The protesting students then attended an event with rapper Lowkey carrying Palestinian flags and signs calling for the freedom of all Palestinian prisoners.
Kiswani announced that he had begun his hunger strike on 19 March against his interrogation and imprisonment, demanding his immediate release. He is not the only Palestinian prisoner on hunger strike: Musaab al-Hindi has been on hunger strike for 15 days in protest of the renewal of his administrative detention, imprisonment without charge or trial; Bashir al-Khatib, imprisoned since 1988 and from occupied Palestine ’48, has been on hunger strike for 14 days to demand medical care; Adel Shehadeh, held in Jalameh detention center, has been on hunger strike for 12 days against his torture under interogation; and Saleh Abu Sawawin from Khan Younis has been on hunger strike for three days against his isolation in Ramon prison.
Hours after he had been told that he would be released from the Negev desert prison after eight months in administrative detention without charge or trial, as he waited near the entrance of the prison for his transport to release, Palestinian prisoner Ismail al-Nattah, 43, was told that his detention had again been extended by another four months.
Rather than being released on 21 March as his family members waited at al-Dhahriya crossing south of al-Khalil to receive him, he was once again returned to the prison cells. His family members denounced the act as another form of torture used by the occupation against administrative detainees and their families, causing them to live in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.
He has been imprisoned by the Israeli occupation since his home was invaded on 23 July 2017 and ransacked by occupation forces. He previously spent five years in Israeli prison.
This comes as administrative detainees continue their boycott of the Israeli military courts for the 39th day, in a protest step against their ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial. They are demanding an end to the policy of administrative detention and launched their mass boycott on 15 February. Occupation forces have threatened the prisoners to bring them before the military courts with force in order to break the boycott.
Palestinian prisoners, including youth activist Saleh Jaidi and Nawaf Sawarka, have been subject to a policy of attempting to break the boycott, as documented by Addameer:
The military court judge had shortened the orders. In response, the military prosecutor filed an appeal with the aim of lengthening the time of detainment.
In solidarity, both the individuals in question and their lawyer did not attend the hearing in the military court at Ofer Prison. This resulted in the judge postponing the hearing until 14 March, knowing that both administrative detention orders were to expire on 18 March.
Again, the individuals in question and their lawyer refused to participate in the proceedings. In response, the judge stated that if Mahmoud Hassan, lawyer for Addameer, and his clients do not attend future hearings then Mahmoud will be referred to the Ethics committee of the Israeli Bar Association and fined. His clients will be brought to the court room, by force if necessary. Additionally, the individuals in question will be held until the conclusion of proceedings.
Such moves represent a concerted effort to crush the boycott. The judge is, without a formal extension of administrative detention order, telling Salah and Nawaf that they will be detained until they attend their court session. In essence, their arbitrary detention will continue, potentially indefinitely, until they give up the boycott.
There are currently around 450 Palestinians jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention; as administrative detention orders are indefinitely renewable, Palestinians can spend years at a time imprisoned under these orders. Since the beginning of the boycott, over 90 administrative detention orders or renewals have been issued; in 2017, 1060 administrative detention orders were issued. Administrative detention was first introduced to Palestine by the British colonial mandate, and it is used today to target community leaders and Palestinian organizers for indefinite imprisonment on the basis of a so-called “secret file.”
On 10 March, the campaign to free imprisoned French-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri achieved a victory over French state repression when the administrative court in Montreuil upheld the right of elected officials in Stains, including Mayor Azzedine Taibi, to post a banner on the city hall calling for the release of Hamouri.
Hamouri, 32, a field researcher for Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, has been imprisoned without charge or trial by Israeli occupation forces since 23 August 2018; despite an official request for his release by France, his administrative detention was renewed by the Israeli occupation.
Dozens of cities and towns throughout France, including Stains, have adopted resolutions demanding Hamouri’s freedom, while over 1,000 elected officials have signed on to the campaign for his immediate release.
Despite French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement that he had requested Hamouri’s release in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his government, through the centrally-appointed official, the prefect of Seine-St-Denis, sued the elected officials of Stains for publicizing the campaign to free Hamouri. Reportedly, a complaint was filed with the prefecture by two pro-Israel pharmacies. The banner had been removed under the prefect’s orders; when it was returned to the location at the front of the city hall, the phrase “as demanded by the president of the Republic” was added.
The new Stains banner, via the Free Salah Hamouri Campaign
The tribunal rejected claims that there was “no local interest” and that the banner violated an obligation of “neutrality,” as well as claims that the city council had not properly decided to hang the banner; the council had previously adopted a motion to engage in all necessary efforts to seek Hamouri’s release.
Over 40 police were present outside the tribunal, where dozens of activists had come to support the Stains officials, including Elsa Lefort, Hamouri’s French wife, who has been banned from Palestine until further notice after being denied entry to Palestine while pregnant with her and Salah’s son. Activist groups, including EuroPalestine, also attended the tribunal in support of Taibi and the campaign to free Hamouri.
Roland Weyl, the legendary 98-year-old human rights lawyer and a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, argued in favor of the city, dismantling the legal claims of the prefecture. Weyl highlighted the repeated attempts of the prefecture to silence support for Palestine and noted that the campaign for the release of Salah is fundamentally not political in nature but a demand for the implementation of human rights and international law. Hamouri, a French citizen owed support and protection by the French state, has been imprisoned since August 2017 without charge or trial.
Weyl also rejected the use of the term “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” for politically fraudulent purposes. “This wording, which suggests that there are two equal parties that confront each other, is false, and I do not use it: when someone enters your home by breaking in and steals property, we do not talk about conflict, but of a thief and his victim.”
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Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network reiterates our total support for the immediate liberation of Salah Hamouri, a dedicated struggler for the freedom of Palestine and the Palestinian prisoners. The French government’s overwhelming inaction on the case of Salah Hamouri despite the mobilization of thousands of citizens and elected officials indicates their extreme disregard for the rights of Palestinians, including those who are French citizens. The French state’s prosecutions of BDS activists and imprisonment of Lebanese struggler for Palestine Georges Ibrahim Abdallah for over 33 years are echoed in the silence and complicity in the ongoing imprisonment of Salah Hamouri. The French government has a clear responsibility to make it clear that Salah Hamouri must be freed and that his ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial under administrative detention is absolutely unacceptable. Free Salah Hamouri! Free Palestine!
2. Organize an action, event or activity to demand an end to Salah Hamouri’s detention and his immediate freedom. Raise his case at events and actions for Palestine.
3. Like and share the Facebook page for Salah Hamouri, which will be regularly updated with news and actions to demand Salah’s freedom: https://www.facebook.com/freesalahhamouri/
Joining in the large International Women’s Day demonstration, protesters marched from Republique to Opera led by a banner urging freedom for 17-year-old Palestinian prisoner Ahed Tamimi. Carrying photos of Ahed and many imprisoned Palestinian women and girls, including Shatila Abu Ayyad, Amal Taqatqa, Marah Bakir, Khalida Jarrar, Lama Bakri, Manar Shwaiki, Nariman Tamimi, Shorouq Dwayyat and others, the marchers chanted for Palestine and to build the boycott of Israel throughout the route of the march.
On 1 March, Mensa Occupata in Naples organized an evening event focusing on the situation of Palestinian prisoners and the case of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the imprisoned Lebanese Communist struggler for Palestine in French prisons for over 33 years.
Speakers from Coup Pour Coup 31, the anti-imperialist collective that is a part of the Samidoun Network, addressed over 60 people and discussed how to build the solidarity movement in Naples and elsewhere. The Coup Pour Coup statement follows:
We begin by warmly thanking the comrades of the Mensa Occupata for the invitation to Naples. For us, it is very important to create links of solidarity internationally, especially when it comes to the fight to free Palestinian prisoners and Georges Abdallah.
Our anti-imperialist collective Coup pour Coup 31 was born in 2009, especially around the struggle for the release of Georges Abdallah.
Why this struggle?
Because Georges Abdallah is an Arab communist. From his days in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where he became politicized in the 1970s, Georges Abdallah has never stopped fighting against capitalism. He has always affirmed his communist commitment, without ever denying his politics. He continues to stand today alongside peoples struggling against imperialism, Zionism and reactionary regimes.
He regularly makes statements of support for revolutionary political prisoners throughout the world, particularly in Morocco, Turkey, the Philippines … He has, of course, supported the various hunger strikes of Palestinian prisoners and more recently the prisoners of ATIK (Confederation of Turkish Workers in Europe) held in Germany.
Because Georges Abdallah is a political prisoner. Locked up in France since 1984, he has been eligible for release since 1999. Despite this, the French state refuses to release him. The US and Israel put pressure in this direction, and it is the successive French governments that keep him in prison and seek to force him to deny his cause.
Because Georges Abdallah is a prisoner of the Palestinian Resistance. He joined the ranks of the PFLP and fought against Zionist colonization. His struggles, when he was free or now while imprisoned, have always been a part of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Today, he embodies the only just and lasting solution: a free, secular and democratic Palestine from the Mediterranean sea to the Jordan river and the return of all Palestinian refugees.
Since 2009, we have been popularizing in Toulouse, France and elsewhere, the case of Georges Abdallah, his battles of yesterday and today. We visit regularly with him and correspond with the comrade. By fighting for his liberation, we are creating links with Palestine, Lebanon and their liberation strugglers. We are proud, for example, to have helped strengthen the ties between Georges Abdallah and the PFLP.
In 2015, in collaboration with the Palestinian Progressive Youth Union, we renamed a street and a square named for Charles de Gaulle in both Toulouse and Gaza for Georges Abdallah!
In 2017, we proposed to Georges Abdallah to make a solidarity photo in support of Ahmad Saadat, secretary general of the PFLP. In return, Ahmad Saadat issued an open letter to Georges.
Georges Abdallah also supported the legitimate struggles of families who have been victims of police crimes, including wearing a “Justice for Adama” T-shirt in solidarity with a young working class Black man who was the victim of a racist crime by the gendarmerie and in support of his brother, Bagui Traoré, who has been incarcerated after being the main witness to the killing of Adama.
Our group has since one year been a member of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Our goal was to intensify our struggle and support for progressive Palestinian prisoners, at the forefront of the struggle against Zionism. To support Palestinian Prisoners means supporting the one in the prisons of French imperialism, Georges Abdallah!
Photo: Coup Pour Coup 31
Following the presentation from Coup Pour Coup, a statement from Georges Abdallah in Italian was read welcoming the initiative and saluting past and current struggles in Italy. The full translated statement is below:
Dear comrades,
Knowing that you gather today in support of an initiative in solidarity with the Palestinian people brings all of the communist and revolutionary Arab prisoners in the Euro-Mediterranean area a great deal of strength and enthusiasm.
These are not mere words of convenience. Comrades, when you are behind these abominable walls for several decades, our words spoken are more charged than usual.
Throughout the past years and your many initiatives of solidarity with Palestine and its imprisoned strugglers, you have worked with others very effectively to demonstrate, among other things, that it is always at the political level that you decide the role and the weight of the judicial rituals from the moment at which the revolutionary protagonists are imprisoned. You have participated very effectively in unmasking and denouncing the judicial rage that resembles the revenge of the state. It is still necessary to emphasize, comrades, that this judicial harassment is not random or gratuitous; it is part of the global dynamics of the counter-revolution. From the Zionist prisons to those in Morocco, from the isolation cells in Turkey to the dark cells in Greece, the Philippines, elsewhere in Asia and around the world, we always make the same observation: judicial harassment is one element of a large array of tactics used by the permanent, preventive counter-revolution. Of course, this set of measures and laws continuously becomes heavier and heavier as the system races toward crisis.
The crisis of a dying capitalism in this phase of advanced putrefaction is already visible on the global level, both in the center of the system and in its peripheries. Just look to see all of this barbarism, these massacres and the “surgical” bombings conducted against the people of Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. It is enough to see this mass of men, women and children thrown into the sea, driven by carnage, fear and famine. But even look, above all, here, in the belly of the best, in Europe, in the United States, in Asia, where fascist forces seize whole limbs of the population disoriented by unemployment, existential precariousness and the advanced process of social degradation. The crisis of capitalism is there. We still must go further than the simple observation of these manifestations and highlight the root causes of this insurmountable crisis of capitalism, unmasking the inanity of the different reformist proposals that flourish these days in France or elsewhere in Europe through left social democracy and electoralism…There is no way to exit the crisis while keeping the framework of capitalism intact. Globalized capitalism is the system that really exists today and the agony it causes the world will end only in the overtaking of the capitalist system towards communism, not through historical compromises or other illusory attempts to safeguard a self-styled democratic capitalism with a human face, but through the implacable struggle of class against class.
Nowadays, we all live under the hegemony of globalized capital. No country can completely escape the destructive mechanism of this hegemony. It is this globalized capitalism that is in crisis, and it is against this capitalism that the communists and all revolutionaries will have to win in order to overcome barbarism.
From one country to another, the measures recommended to serve capital are almost always the same: making the popular masses bear the maintenance costs of a moribund system of exploitation. These measures only amplify the vastness of the disaster and accentuate the dynamics of crisis even more. The more the crisis develops and the more the foundations of the power of globalized capital, the imperial states, increase their interventions in the peripheries, increasing their pressure on oppressed peoples and attempting to blackmail existing bourgeois regimes.
Comrades, there is a space for another future rather than submission to imperial dictates whose consequences we can see in the form of the destruction of entire cities, the dismantling of states, the parade of the dead and the forced migration.
Comrades, Palestine these days counts its daily share of young martyrs. Nevertheless, the resistance continues and will certainly continue until the defeat of the Zionist occupation. Naturally, the Palestinian masses can rely more than ever on your active solidarity. However, I would like to draw attention to the number of Palestinian children who are increasingly involved in the struggle of the masses and face severe repression from the Zionist military and its magistrates who inflict the heaviest sentences upon them. When you are only 14 or 15 years old and you are being sentenced to 10 or 15 years, you have the greatest need for international solidarity. A word from time to time for every lion cub and every flower helps to ensure that the Zionist jailers understand that these children are not alone.
Let a thousand solidarity initiatives flourish in support of Palestine and its Intifada.
Solidarity, all solidarity with the resisters in Zionist prisons and in the isolation cells in Morocco, Turkey, Greece, the Philippines and all over the world!
Solidarity, all solidarity, with the young proletarians of the popular neighborhoods!
Capitalism is no more than barbarism, honor to all those who oppose it in the diversity of their expressions!
Together, comrades, we will win!
To all of you my warmest revolutionary greetings.
Your comrade Georges Abdallah
Next, the Naples Coordination for Palestine presented on the situation of occupied Palestine, the prisoners and the resistance, and two Palestinians from al-Khalil discussed the closure and oppression in the city. Both football players, they noted the occupation’s tactics of repressing Palestinian popular football, including denial of travel and the blockade of Gaza.
The BDS Campaign spoke about the need to build the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and to resist attempts to criminalize and repress Palestine solidarity in Europe. In particular, they emphasized the need to build the campaign against the Giro d’Italia bicycle race to demand it move its starting point from occupied Palestine.
Photo: Coup Pour Coup 31
The participants discussed solidarity between the Palestinian and Kurdish movements, the situation of the Palestinian resistance today and how to organize for Palestine before concluding the evening with a solidarity meal and music.
Palestinian prisoner Amani al-Hashem, 32, from Beit Hanina east of Jerusalem, was sentenced on Sunday, 25 March to 10 years in Israeli occupation prisons. The sentencing came after repeated continuances of her case; she has been imprisoned since 13 December 2016, when occupation forces fired live bullets at her and her car near the Qalandiya checkpoint, accusing her of attempting to run over Israeli occupation forces.
After being seized at the checkpoint, she was interrogated and subject to torture and ill-treatment for 14 days when held in the notorious Moskobiyeh detention center. Hearings in her case were continued on 22 occasions.
Israa Jaabis
Severely wounded Palestinian prisoner Israa Jaabis was transferred to Hadassah medical center on 18 March for medical tests. Jaabis, 32, has burns over 65 percent of her body and eight of her fingers were amputated after a fire in her car when a cooking gas cylinder exploded inside 500 meters from an Israeli checkpoint in October 2015.
During and after the fire, which was contained inside her car, she was treated like a “security threat” rather than a person in a medical emergency by occupation forces; she was sentenced to 11 years in Israeli prison and accused of “attempted murder” of an occupation soldier. Her much-needed medical treatment has been repeatedly delayed; she recently had two surgical procedures, one to separate her right armpit, fused to her body through burning, and another to perform a skin transplant under her eye.
Jaabis, the mother of one, lives with constant pain and suffering and requires multiple serious medical procedures. The occupation appeals court rejected her petition to reduce her sentence due to her severe health status. While she was held in the hospital after her operations, she was kept shackled hand and foot to her hospital bed despite her severe injuries and pain; in a letter to her sister and brother, she said that she asked to be returned to the prison early due to the pain from the tight shackles.
Khadija al-Ruba’i
Meanwhile, on 14 March, the Israeli occupation military courts issued an additional two-month administrative detention order against Khadija al-Ruba’i, one of three Palestinian women jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention along with Palestinian parliamentarian and feminist leader Khalida Jarrar and journalist and prisoners’ advocate Bushra al-Tawil. Al-Ruba’i, 33 and the mother of five children, has been imprisoned without charge or trial since 9 October 2017; she has been ordered twice to administrative detention without charge or trial for three months. The two-month renewal was set to be the final order against her.
Yasmin Abu Srour, 20, a Palestinian refugee from Aida camp near Bethlehem, was sentenced on Thursday, 22 March to seven months in Israeli prison. The young woman was accused of “incitement” for posting on Facebook about Palestinian politics and the Israeli occupation.
Ola Marshoud
Meanwhile, in Balata refugee camp in Nablus, occupation forces invaded the home of Ola Marshoud, 21, a freelance journalist and a university student at Al-Najah National University in Nablus. She has been detained by occupation forces for over a week, after she was ordered to come to the Huwwarra detention center for interrogation by occupation security forces. Her family reported that occupation forces ransacked the home searching for her mobile phone and interrogated her parents. Her detention was extended for an additional week on Saturday, 17 March. Students at Al-Najah held a protest to demand the release of Marshoud.
Several other women prisoners’ cases were continued by the Israeli occupation courts, including Fadwa Hamadeh, accused of attempting to participate in a Palestinian resistance attack against occupation soldiers.
